"Museum": from image control to liberation of imagination

The museum is an important institution of modernity which continually exercises control over images. The museum creates and legitimates hierarchies of images, determines their (in)visibility and place within discourses, it has a direct and indirect influence on how we perceive images. For several decades, artists associated with so called institutional critique have analyzed in what ways the museum as a space of power was producing and disseminating knowledge about the world. This article is focused on an art project Museum by Lithuanian artist Dainius Liškevičius, premiered at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius in spring 2012. The project consists of a museum like space with an exposition presenting three historical figures, famous for their anti- Soviet protest, and the artist’s own life and career. Being a part of institutional critique Museum differs from the classics of this trend in its relation to the institution: rather than critically deconstructing the idea or a space of museum, the project joins the museum discourse with new ideas. The article researches the project in the light of post-Soviet memory culture. After 1989 the museum has been playing a significant role in post-Soviet memory culture. Representations of the Soviet past are quite numerous in Lithuanian museums. However, most of them represent an anti-Soviet attitude towards the past rather than a complex history of life and culture under the Soviet regime. The absence of history manifests itself either by reducing the historical narrative to a story of communist crimes and their victims, or by distancing the spectator from the Soviet past by turning it into an exotic story of the ‘Other’. This situation may be due not only to the memory politics in today’s Lithuania, but also to the modern notion of the museum founded on ‘clarity’, ‘rationality’ and ‘purity’. Liškevičius’ project proposes a different model of the museum drawing rather upon the pre-modern cabinet of curiosity. Its heroes are obscure and controversial, individual memories connect to collective history, real facts and fiction intertwine. Subjective, interactive and heterogeneous nature of Museum reminds of cabinets in the 16th and 17th centuries, where various objects were assembled and exhibited in order to arouse human curiosity. Curiosity hence is understood as a powerful tool to encourage, rather than conceal, contradictions about the past and also as a possibility to draw nearer to what is considered to be remote, strange or even scary. Taking a post-colonial stance the article discusses how these hybrid ways of representation may serve the liberation of imagination in the museum and how it may impact on ways we deal with the traumatic (Soviet) past